Francis Leo Hogan Unit Title ESL AND THE MEDIA.
Grade Level: ESL–2, Adult Students, middle-to-high
intermediate ESL level.
School: NYCDOE, Office of Adult and Continuing Education
[OACE]
SITE LOCATION - P.S.9, 250 E 183rd St.
Bronx, NY
There are 30 students in the class, mixed gender, ages
21-65, multi-skilled in English ability and in reading, writing, speaking and
listening abilities, too. They come from Spanish Speaking, Hispanic countries,
Arabic speaking Middle Eastern countries, French speaking West African
countries , and Puerto Rico. In all, nine countries are represented.
Topic Area: ESL
ADULT LITERACY
UNIT THEME: “UNDERSTANDING THE
MEDIA”: The English Language Media and the Spanish Language Media”
Democracy Now! Es@DemocracyNowEs
Democracy Now! es un noticiero independiente de radio y televisión en
Estados Unidos, que transmite a través de internet por:
Designed by: Teacher, Mr. Francis Leo Hogan, III
Goal: The Overarching Goal of this Project is to Heighten
the Knowledge and Awareness on the Part
of the Students About the Role of the Media in Our Lives in General This
adult ESL-2 class will use OACE’s resources: reading materials, available
laptops, internet searching, and special
reading materials designed and supplied for ESL students in order for them to
understand how newspapers ‘work’, how the media works as a ‘business’ and how
the media influences our daily lives in
the short term and in the long term. We will use Democracy Now! Clips of news
stories and media events in order to compare and contrast how the media
influences our view of events and our thinking on various topics. We will view
English language media stories and Spanish language media stories ON THE SAME
TOPICS, where and when possible, and observe IF and HOW the two language-cultures
approach and present the stories in the
same ways, why and why not?
This project will be an on-going, multi class activity, over
3 months, with one class per week devoted exclusively to this project throughout
the term, wherein during each session the class can either review past media
research stories, or keep exploring and researching new materials, and
keep adding more information to their
portfolios as the project progresses. Each class session is 3 hours long with a
15 minute break in the middle of each session. The class meets 5 mornings a
week, Mon-Fri, 8:30am – 11:30am, Sept – June.
Motivation: Think! What would life be like if we never had any
information about the rest of the world? Why is it good that we DO have
information? Is there such a thing as “good” information and “bad” information?
DAY ONE Lesson Aim:
Do Now: What is “the media”? Define the words used to
describe ‘the media’.
Write a short
description of what you think the media is.
SWBAT- List and
describe in English the various forms of current media that they know about.
Vocabulary Lesson.
“Learning the words!”… SWBAT
–List and describe the forms of media used in their countries , in their
languages, and compare and contrast which ones are more popular in the USA and
which ones are more popular in their countries.
Are they similar or different?
Essential Questions:
1 Which media are free to the consumer and
which media costs money to the consumer?
2. Does paying for media influence what the consumer watches or
sees and / or believes is the ‘truth’?
3. Is “the truth” important in telling a story? Why? Why not?
4. How many different varieties or ‘the media’ are there; and who do
they send their message to?
5. Should the media be totally free or should the consumer have to pay
for information?
6. Is it the responsibility of the government to supply the ‘truth’ to
the consumer in the form of ‘the media?”, or is it the responsibility of a
‘free market’ economy to supply information to the public?
7. Can you think of one instance where a media story “made history”?
Materials Needed:
For this 1st class lesson, each student will
bring into class one copy of one English language daily newspaper, one copy
of one Non-English language daily or
weekly or bi-weekly, and a list of that week’s TV show listings and, if
possible, radio show listings. Students will discuss the wide sources of media
coverage in our lives with these examples.
Students will have a general and basic guided discussion of
the formats of these newspapers, what the class thinks about the ‘economy’ of the
media, that is, how does the media make
any money? Each media will be put into a “target market” classification. Who is
the particular media or topic aimed at?
-Comparing foreign media with USA medial. Look into
details of free newspapers.
Explicit Instruction:
After the class completes their Do Now, students will make a
circle diagram on the black board / or chart paper to show how the different
parts of the media touch our lives : How it (a) informs us, (b) advertise to us,
(c) creates new ideas within our thinking,(d) creates new wants and likes, (e)
persuades us in one direction or another,(f)
helps us to help our families live better lives, and more.
By the end of the lesson, students should have learned all
the various ways that the media influences us and how that influence happens,
sometimes even without us being totally
aware of it taking place.
Home Research
From Classmates’ Comments: -Design activities
that allow them to transfer their knowledge they already have
Students go home ,look at their TV programs more
critically and make notes about how they
think they are influenced by what they see and hear.
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/7/11/this_years_best_kept_secret_the_next_generation_of_community_radio
.
INCLUDED: Insert Graphics of
logos of “WHO OWNS THE MEDIA?”
DAY TWO
Class shares their Home Research Observations.
What has the previous lesson and the Home Research
Observations done to the make students more aware of how the media influences
our lives?
References:
http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/media/how.html
“How to Use the Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning.”
Students discuss how they can be more ‘critical’ of media
when they next watch a story or read an article. What “frame” is being used? Is
that the only side to the story?
Re: Standards: .i.e Common Core Standards vs. Equipped for the Future Content Standards
The NYCDOE’s Office of Adult and Continuing Education
(OACE), the Division which I work under.
is in the process of moving away from the EFF standards notated below
to Common Core Standards. But for this
project, I will still use the EFF Content Standards.
Equipped for the Future Content Standards
What Adults Need to Know and Be Able
to Do in the 21st Century
JANUARY 2000
SECOND PRINTING – SEPTEMBER 2000
THIRD PRINTING – JULY 2001
Starting in 1994, the National
Institute for Literacy began an initiative called Equipped for the Future (EFF)
to develop a framework for adult learning based on content standards. These
content standards were constructed to strengthen the ability of adult education
providers to improve their programs to better meet the needs of adult learners
and the wider community. EFF is now managed by the UT Center for Literacy,
Education & Employment.
Here you will find information on
the foundational pieces of the EFF framework including the four purposes for learning,
the three role maps,
the 13 common activities that overlap the roles, and the 16 EFF Content Standards.
The EFF Content Standards are the fundamental tools in facilitating the EFF approach
to teaching, learning, & assessing and for program improvement. The
standards represent a consensus of what is important for learners to know and
be able to do and are linked to the primary purposes that motivate adult
learning. [Note: Click on the image below to go directly to the EFF
Skills Wheel.]
Communication
Standards:
Speak
So Others Can Understand
Listen
Actively
Observe
Critically.
Listen
Actively
Use
Information and Communication Technology
The EFF Content Standards and How
They Work
The 16 EFF Content
Standards define the knowledge and skills adults need in order to
successfully carry out their roles as parents and family members, citizens
and community members, and workers. Keeping a focus clearly on what adults
need literacy for, EFF identified 16 core skills that supported effective
performance in the home, community, and workplace. Then, through two years of
iterative field and expert review, we defined Content Standards that describe
what adults need to know and be able to do to use these 16 skills in everyday
life.
|
The EFF Skills
Wheel: The 16 EFF Content Standards
To explore an individual Standard,
click on a skill below.
 Lesson Plan CRITIQUE Rubic | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Strengths: Lesson or unit EFFECTIVELY SUPPORTS student’s efforts
to become better, more strategic critical thinkers. How does it do this?
COMMENTS FROM MY
CLASSMATES
-They think about how
media affects our life by comparing and contrasting media for different
languages.
-Liked the Do Now
question. You have developed some strong discussion questions about the role of
media in our lives.
-To use a topic like
“The Media”, which students know about and have their own personal experience
in thinking about media. It’s effective to teach language and use things they
already know, ie media. Great questions for discussions.
-Design activities that allow them to transfer their
knowledge they already have
-I like the
comparative structure of the lesson. It will be interesting to see how analysis
will be conducted around the producers of the media stories.
-Comparing framing of
news from different sources and targeted at different audiences.
-The lesson brings
the students into the English lesson in a way that directly affects the
students.
-Comparing foreign media with USA medial. Look into
details of free newspapers.
-Identify ways in which this lesson plan or
unit supports the achievement of integrating media literacy and the use of
various media, especially DN! Be specific Explain why any elements of the lesson
plan you identify are positive aspects of the plan or not.
Classmates’
Comments
-Students can discuss
the influences of different media especially in students’ native language.
-The clip works
nicely to the questions you raised.
-Again, it’s very
effective to use media to discuss in English.
A form for media literacy would be helpful to analyze the various media
both newspapers and electronic media.
-Students have
opportunities to seek out media and relate their finding to their English language goals.
-Introduce English
language words related to the media.
-The democratizing
feeling given from the idea of opening up the airwaves.
-Discussion about the types of media available. A clip on
media democracy.
Weaknesses: Identify ways in which the lesson / unit fails to
support the achievement of the goals outlined for the final. Be specific.
Explain why any elements of the lesson you identify are problematic aspects of
the plan. For each problem you identify in the lesson, offer a concrete
suggestion for improving it.
Classmates’
Comments
-Too many essential questions.
It’s much better to make it into 3 by grouping them regarding the big idea.
-(Just some Literacy ELL Questions) 1. What is the general
literacy of the students in their native language? When reading news in their
native language, will there be some differences with finding reading level(s)
appropriate information? 2. How will they be developing their language skills
in English if they are mostly reading in their native language? 3. It might be
helpful to provide a media observation worksheet for day 1. Reflection for
homework.
- Use the DN! Clip we looked at during your final
presentation. The short clip is very useful. ….Try to incorporate speaking
about whether or not they think their voices are heard….Bring in the question:
How is the media they consume constructed? Ask them who they think made the
“message”.
-The article could be too long and complex text. ….If they
use both languages, they can be confused….Are they going to answer in Spanish?
-It would be interesting to see more visual media, although
I know your technology resources are limited in class.
-Make sure your exact links are set up and red to go for the
lesson.
-Need for more visual media in order to hook students into
the English language.
What could have been better thought
through?
Classmates’
Comments
-How / Based on what criteria will students be able to
compare their media awareness?
-How are students processing the articles and clips? How
will they compare?
-Try creating some graphics organizers that help students
zoom in on elements of the text or clip you want them to compare and contrast.
What specific vocabulary do you want students to learn?
-More defined group activities surrounding the media you
display.
Does the lesson / unit effectively
provide an opportunity to monitor student comprehension?
Classmates’
Comments
-The documents they file in their portfolios can master
student’s comprehension.
-How will you assess their development as media researchers
/ thinkers?
-It sounds like students will have active opportunities to
engage and should be able to express comprehension then.
-Seems like you have a great handle on observational
monitoring but you may need to have a rubric for comprehension so they can stay
on track.
-Guidance throughout the completion of the task. Group
discussion.
Other classmates’ comments and other
suggestions.
-Student-centered articles are good.
-Can this be framed more as “do you think the media shows
your story as immigrants living in NYC?
-Additional resources: On TV news: Neil Postman
INCLUDED: Insert Graphics of
logos of “WHO OWNS THE MEDIA?”
-When you say comparing news in English and Spanish, and you
say : they don’t know about America news, you’re still comparing mainstream media.
-Home research is an important component.
-Suggest the students to use the closed caption button to
read as they listen to TV or watch movies.
Juan Gonzalez: News For All The People:
An Epic Story of Race and the American Media” After seven years of
research, the groundbreaking new book, "News for All the People: The Epic
Story of Race and the American Media," examines how the media has played a
pivotal role in perpetuating racist views in the United States. It recalls
lives of the unsung pioneering black, Latino, Native American and
Asian-American journalists who challenged the worst racial aspects of the
white-owned media. It also tells the untold story of how the fight over who
controls the internet is just the latest chapter in a centuries-old debate on
the role of the media — and the technologies used to deliver it — in a
democracy. Today, in a Democracy Now! exclusive, we speak with the book’s
authors, Democracy Now! co-host and award-winning journalist Juan González, and
Joseph Torres of the media reform organization Free Press. "One of the
things that we’ve uncovered is that this fundamental debate that is constantly
occurring is: does our nation need a centralized system of news and
information, or does it need a decentralized, autonomous system? And which
serves democracy best?" González says. "It turns out that in those
periods of time when the government has opted for a decentralized or autonomous
system, democracy has had a better opportunity to flourish, racial minorities have
been able to be heard more often and to establish their own press. In those
periods of the nation’s history when policies have fostered centralized news
and information, that’s when dissident voices, racial minorities, marginalized
groups in society are excluded from the media system." On the role of
civil rights groups in the digital age, Torres notes that "the internet is
an open platform. [Internet service providers], up to now, have not been able
to interfere with your web traffic. You can access any site you want without
being slowed down. What they want to do is ... have a pay-for-play system,
where if you have a website at Democracy Now!, Democracy Now! will have to pay
more to make sure the public can see your site at the fastest speeds, otherwise
you’re going to be slowed down. For people of color, it is critical, because of
the low barrier of entries, the internet, that we keep the internet open — a
free platform — because we don’t have the economic wealth to be able to pay
ISPs to make sure our sites are loaded faster." [includes rush transcript]
AMY GOODMAN: In Washington, a battle over the future
of the internet appears to be intensifying. The Federal Communications
Commission recently issued a series of rules on net neutrality dictating how
internet service providers manage their networks. One aim of the rules is to
bar companies from giving preferential treatment to content due to
considerations such as political or financial interests.
The rules are facing
opposition, and a string of lawsuits have already been filed. Telecom giant
Verizon has sued to overturn the net neutrality rules, while a coalition of
public interest groups have filed lawsuits in an effort to strengthen and eliminate
loopholes that could allow phone and cable companies from dividing the internet
into fast and slow lanes.
Today we spend the
hour on a groundbreaking new book that examines an untold story about the
American media system, that looks at how the fight over the internet is just
the latest chapter in a centuries-old debate on the government’s role in
regulating new technology. The book is called News for All the People:
The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. It is written by our very
own Juan Gonzalez, co-host of Democracy Now! for the whole 15
years of its existence, and Joe Torres.
The book also examines
how the press, dating back to the very first newspaper in the United States,
has played a pivotal role in perpetuating racist views among the general
population. In addition, the book recalls the lives of many unsung pioneering
black, Latino, Native American and Asian-American journalists who repeatedly
challenged the worst racial aspects of the white-owned media.
Juan Gonzalez and Joe
Torres join us today in studio for the hour. In addition to being co-host ofDemocracy
Now!, Juan is a prize-winning columnist at the New York Daily News,
former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Among his
previous books, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America.
Joe Torres is the senior adviser for government and external affairs for Free
Press, the national media reform organization. He’s the former deputy director
of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
It’s great to have you
both with us. And Juan, usually you’re sitting next to me.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, I know. It’s difficult on the
other side of the table for a change. Yeah, it’s unusual.
AMY GOODMAN: But it is my delight. You both have been
working on this for more than seven years, and of course bringing our life
experience to this, as well. Juan, start off by laying out the thesis of News
for All the People.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, one of the things that I’ve tried
to do after about 30-something years of working in the corporate media, as well
as obviously 15 years here with Democracy Now!, but even before
that as someone who was always on the media aspect of community and labor
organizing for—going back to 45 years, I never was able to clearly understand
why our media system is the way it is. The American people love to hate the
media, in terms of their constant frustration with how newspapers and
television and radio don’t provide accurate coverage. But it’s especially true
among people of color. African Americans and Latinos and Native Americans and
Asians have always felt denigrated and somehow misrepresented, deeply, by the
American media system. But I didn’t understand quite why there’s been so much
resistance to change by the system, so Joe and I decided about seven years ago
we were going to get to the bottom of this by really examining the entire
history of the American system of news and how it developed.
And we were shocked,
as we delved deeper into the archives all around the country—presidential
archives, the National Archives in Washington—we began examining a lot of the
old press—that there had never really been a cogent theory developed of how the
system has developed. And so we’ve come up with a theory that we try to explain
in the book, but we also have a lot of documentation of how things have
happened with our media system.
The basic theory that
we’ve come up with is that, one, that the media system has never been a free
market system, per se, but that the government has played critical
roles throughout the history of the development of news and information in the
United States in adopting policies that affected how our system would develop.
The government subsidized many of the technologies that eventually developed,
whether it was the telegraph, satellite broadcasting, the original research
into the internet. So taxpayers funded a lot of the research and development
that created our different media platforms. And at critical junctures, this new
technology always subverts the existing order.
And we’ve identified
actually five major periods in American history, whether it was a new
technology developed, and that affected how the system was going, was
operating, and Congress had to step in and rewrite the rules of the system. And
so, you know, other scholars have called these the constitutive moments in the
history of the media system. So we’ve tried to outline how that developed, from
the early Post Office for newspapers; the rise of the telegraph, that gave
rise—that really made possible the wire services that dominated news throughout
the late 19th century; the rise of radio, then of cable television, because
television was really just an extension of radio, the rise of cable television;
and finally the rise of the internet. Each of these new technologies has
created a huge debate over what is the role of the media in a democracy and
what is the role of the government in establishing the rules of operation by
which all the different groups in society will be able to have access or be
heard or produce news.
And so, that’s the
general—and one of the things that we’ve uncovered is that this fundamental
debate that is constantly occurring is, do—does our nation need a centralized
system of news and information, or does it need a decentralized, autonomous
system? And which serves democracy best? And it turns out that in those periods
of time when the government has opted for a decentralized or autonomous system,
democracy has flourished—has had a better opportunity to flourish, racial
minorities have been able to be heard more often and to establish their own
press. And in those periods of the nation’s history when policies have fostered
centralized news and information, that’s when dissident voices, racial
minorities, marginalized groups in the society are excluded from the media
system, so that the issue of centralism versus localism is critical to a
democratic media system. So that’s the overall theory that we’ve developed in
terms of how the role of government constitutive policies, the seminal moments
when new technology subverts the existing order, and the role of the battle
between localism and centralism, as the fundamental battle in whether we have a
democratic media system or a controlled and authoritarian media system.
AMY GOODMAN: And Joe Torres, why did you write News
for All the People? And how did you come up with that title?
JOSEPH TORRES: Well, the title is a—it took a long time
to come up with this title. And actually, it’s a title that we kind of agreed
upon at the end and we actually kind of like now. So, titles are tricky things,
as you probably know. But we decided to write this book because when Juan
became president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in 2002,
there was great upheaval going on in that year. Bush came into office, and
Michael Powell was the chairman of the FCC. And in that year, he decided
to—he wanted to relax our nation’s ownership rules. He wanted to basically get
rid of—
AMY GOODMAN: This was Michael Powell.
JOSEPH TORRES: Michael Powell, the son of Colin Powell.
What he basically wanted to do was get rid of most rules. He wanted to allow
one company in the largest market to own the newspaper, up to three television
stations, eight radio stations, and a local cable franchise, all in the same
market. And working for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and
when Juan became president, we basically understood that consolidation is not
good for the newsroom, is not good for the quality of journalism. So, as
journalists, we should care about the quality of journalism.
But as people of
color, what Juan is talking about—centralization versus decentralization—when
you have greater centralization of medium, this means that we cannot tell our
own stories, that people of color cannot own radio stations, can’t own
television stations. When other people tell our stories, they tell it wrong.
And so, what is the greatest promotion you can have as a journalist is to
actually own your station and to be the boss. And when we have other stations
or when we have other folks telling our stories, this is why we get the kind of
coverage that—historically where we’re marginalized. And we believe we need—so,
as journalists, we believe we needed to get into that battle. It was a tough
battle, because journalists are naturally not inclined to want to take on their
bosses. They will get involved in issues like free speech issues, but when it
comes to get in the way of their bosses trying to get bigger and please
shareholders, that’s another thing. So, but we got involved, and that’s how we
started off.
And then, in 2004,
basically, we wanted to educate our members and journalists of color about this
issue. We wrote a pamphlet called "How Long Must We Wait?" we
distributed at the UNITYConvention in 2004. From there, we got some funding
from the Ford Foundation, and it led to—to work on this book. So that’s how we
got—we wanted to take the lessons we learned, even in that pamphlet, and expand
upon it. So, that’s what we did.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to go back through the
history of the U.S. media after break, and we’re going to talk about some of
the great crusading journalists—Ida B. Wells, who crusaded against lynching,
Frederick Douglass. Even we’ll talk about where José Martí fits into this. This
isDemocracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
Our guests, Joe Torres and Juan Gonzalez, have just completed their epic
work, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American
Media. Back with them in a moment.
AMY GOODMAN: "Sueños de Oro," "Dreams
of Gold," by Pedro González. This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Our
guests today are, well,Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez and Joe
Torres. They have just completed a masterpiece:News for All the People: The
Epic Story of Race and the American Media_. This begins theirtour">tour
around the country, as they speak in New York, in the Bay Area, in Los Angeles,
in New Mexico, in Colorado and Washington, D.C., to tell the story of race as a
central theme in the development of the U.S. media.
Now, that song you
were just listening to was not just any song. Juan, not that you’re related,
but can you talk about who Pedro González was?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Pedro González was one of those
unsung heroes of American media and journalism. He was a radio host—a singer,
actually. That was—originally, a telegraph operator in Mexico, who then came to
the United States and became a radio host in the 1930s in Los Angeles. And he
had a morning show, Los Madrugadores, where basically he was
talking to and playing songs for the migrant workers who were working in the
fields early in the morning. And in the 1930s, President Herbert Hoover
instituted a mass deportation program to ship Mexican immigrants back to
Mexico. It was at the height of the Depression, and the media was stirring up,
just as they are now, anti-immigrant fervor. And so, there was a massive
deportation program where about a million Mexicans were shipped back to Mexico.
And Pedro González was one of the few radio announcers in those days who was
constantly condemning these raids, these immigration raids, and deportations on
his radio station.
He was suddenly
arrested by the Los Angeles district attorney and charged with—on a fabricated
rape charge, and sentenced to San Quentin Prison, where in 1939 he actually
organized a hunger strike of the inmates of San Quentin against conditions in
the prison system. Sounds very modern, doesn’t it, in terms of his activities?
Eventually, it turned out that his accuser recanted and admitted that she had
been put up to the charges by authorities, and Pedro González was released from
prison, but immediately deported to Mexico, where he ended up in Tijuana for
many years as a radio announcer, eventually came back to the United States,
where he died here at the age of 99 several years ago.
But he was one of
these early heroes who used his media platform to try to stand against
injustice for immigrant workers. But he’s virtually unknown. I mean, there was
a PBS documentary that was done on him several years ago. But
largely, in most media histories, you never hear about him. Some of the songs
that you’re playing are from one of his albums, because, as I said, he was a
popular singer of his day. And there are actually corridos, ballads,
written about the injustices of the jailing of Pedro González in the 1930s.
AMY GOODMAN: Go back to colonial times, the first
newspaper in the United States, its significance, and then take us forward.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, see, this is what people don’t—it’s
true that African Americans and Latinos and Asian Americans were not employed
by the media until really—in large numbers, 'til the 1970s. But race has always
been a major topic of the American media, from the start. And we went back to
the first newspaper in North America, Publick Occurrences, in 1690
in Boston. It was a three-page sheet and the first newspaper. And it was
suppressed by the Massachusetts Council after one issue, because it had some
provocative articles in it. But when you read the first newspaper, you realize
that the bulk of the content—five articles in that newspaper—is intelligence to
the settlers about what the Native Americans are up to. Basically, to quote
the—Benjamin Harris, who was the editor and publisher of the paper, he says at
one point, when he's talking about the Mohawks and the battles of the
Massachusetts colony with the—with Canadian settlers, he says, "If
Almighty God will have Canada to be subdu’d without the assistance of those
miserable Savages...we shall be glad." And all of the articles were about
the threats of Native Americans, except there was one positive article. And
that was about how some Christianized Indians in Plymouth were giving thanks to
God on Thanksgiving. But generally—and so, Publick Occurrences set
the prototype for how race would be covered in America, because every newspaper
subsequent to that, throughout the colonial period, a huge portion of the
content of newspapers was for the settlers to know what the Indians were up to.
AMY GOODMAN: And then we can go to the quote in Joe
and Juan’s book from the New York Tribune editor and publisher
Horace Greeley. In an 1854 account of his trip to the Western frontier, Greeley
wrote, "I have learned to appreciate...the dislike, aversion, contempt,
wherewith Indians are usually regarded by their white neighbors, and have been
since the days of the Puritans."
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes, well, interestingly, Greeley was
well known in the 19th century as one who was opposed to slavery. He was a
publisher who constantly railed against slavery. But when it came to Native
Americans and when it came to the Chinese immigrants, he was incredibly racist
in the kind of coverage that his paper, which was the New York Times of
its day—the Tribune in the mid and late 19th century was the
paper of record in the United States. And Greeley was amazingly racist toward
Native Americans and toward the Chinese, while at the same time advocating
abolition of slavery.
AMY GOODMAN: On the issue of Native Americans, Joe
Torres, can you talk about Ora Eddleman Reed, known as the "Sunshine
Lady"?
JOSEPH TORRES: Sure, she’s—her family, or her mother,
owned a newspaper in Oklahoma, and she ended up taking over the business and
running a magazine called Twin Territories, which really became
the—a place where Native American literature really thrived. And she went on
to—in Casper, Wyoming, to a station in 1924, to really be really the first
Native American to be a broadcaster. And it just shows that—it is an example
how, early on, how there were several people—there were several journalists of
color who actually worked in the mainstream. Her mother owned, and her sister
and her, they worked in the mainstream press. And there’s a few examples of
that, not too many, but there are a few examples, you know, 100-150 years ago,
where people of color actually worked in the mainstream press. And she’s a
prime example.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, another example of that, totally
unknown, John Rollin Ridge, a Cherokee Indian writer, novelist, wrote a novel
about Joaquín Murieta, the California so-called bandit. But John Rollin Ridge
ended up moving to California and becoming—founding the Sacramento Bee and
being the first editor and publisher of the Sacramento Bee. Now, he
eventually sold the paper to James McClatchy, one of his employees. And, of
course, McClatchy developed the Sacramento Bee into the
flagship newspaper of the McClatchy newspaper chain.
You go to the
McClatchy history on their website, their official history, there’s no mention
that a Cherokee Indian was the founder of their flagship paper. They make it
seem like James McClatchy actually started the Bee. But it’s this
kind of expunging of the actual history of African Americans and Latinos and
Native Americans in the development of the American press that is what
really—another major theme of our book is to resurrect that history and have a
more inclusive history of how our press developed, that there were all kinds of
folks who have played pivotal roles, and actually heroic roles, in the
development of a free press in America that have been expunged from the
official histories.
AMY GOODMAN: Joe Torres?
JOSEPH TORRES: Yeah, may I add something, you know,
that was interesting about the book, is that Juan talked about the Publick
Occurrence, and here you had a positive story about Native Americans who
were actually fighting with the white settlers on the same side, is that we
have another story in the book where there’s a Seminole woman who came to the
aid of a white settler, a teenage woman, and saved a white settler’s life. We
have—when we were at NAHJ, we had a study, a Brownout study, showed that
really the only positive coverage of immigrants, to this day, is when they
fought in the military. And so, it’s like a theme that has been constant for 400
years, when we’re fighting alongside the settler—or here, the U.S. military, we
found in the Brownout reports—that’s really the few times where you actually
see a positive portrayal of people of color. And that is a constant theme.
And also, too, the
issue of expansion, as these papers really were writing about—very supportive
of U.S. expansion. And that’s a theme that stills plays out today. You know,
with The War and Peace Report and everything, and how the U.S.
media really is very supportive of military operations, and that is a theme
that continues to play out to this day, too.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And I think also the role that is rarely
acknowledged of the press by people of color of being antiwar and
anti-imperialist. And one of my favorites is Frederick Douglass, who not only
was the editor of several African-American newspapers throughout his lifetime,
but who was also one of the most vocal opponents of the U.S. war against Mexico
and was constantly, in his papers, railing against it.
I just want to quote
one article that appeared in one of Douglass’s papers. This is 18 months into
the Mexican-American War, and he says, "We have seen for eighteen months,
the work of mutilation, crime and death go on, each advancing step sunk deeper
in human gore. By every mail has come some new deed of violence. Cities have
been attacked, and the cry of helpless women and children has risen, amid the
shrieks and agony of death and dishonor. The living have gone forth, and dead
corpses encased in lead have returned. Thousands of widows and orphans have
sent up to the heavens their pitiful wail...
"And yet all is
quiet as under the most perfect despotism. There is no united appeal, which
would make the rulers tremble; no thronging voices of petition, no indignant
rebuke, no prayer, 'Lord, how long?'"
He was basically
chastising the rest of the press and the leaders of the country that—the
silence over the continuing slaughter that was occurring in Mexico as a result
of the Mexican-American War, which of course was a war that sharply increased
the size of the United States by all the territories that were taken after the
U.S. victory.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, Frederick Douglass owned
his own paper. Tell the story of who Frederick Douglass was, his significance.
I mean, the most famous abolitionist in the United States, born a slave. But
from there, why he chose the media as his form of liberation?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, he was an amazing—anyone who’s
read any of the works of Frederick Douglass knows what an incredible writer he
was. But he was an escaped slave and actually was hidden away, when he arrived
in New York, by another journalist, David Ruggles, who was the editor of
the Mirror of Liberty and who—Ruggles not only was an editor
of a newspaper, he was always constantly hiding fugitive slaves in New York
from the slave catchers. And Douglass was one of the people who Ruggles saved,
and he then—Douglass then went on to edit several newspapers and became a close
friend of William Lloyd Garrison, obviously, who published The Liberator,
as well.
But, so—but Douglass
was incredible in not only in his opposition to imperialist war, but in his
championing the rights of women. He had many women writing for his newspaper.
He was always advocating the equality of women. So he was far ahead of his time
on many issues, one of the really great journalists of the 20th century—of the
19th century. And—but then again, except in the African-American community,
he’s rarely talked about as the critical figure that he was.
JOSEPH TORRES: Can I—
AMY GOODMAN: Joe?
JOSEPH TORRES: Can I—so, what’s really incredible about
everything Juan is saying is the fact that there were African Americans and
people of color actually writing stuff and were brave enough to actually put
word to print in a time of oppressive discrimination in our country. And it
goes to the point that Juan made when he began the discussion about
centralization versus decentralization. The reason these guys were able to put
out papers, because the U.S. postal system was a decentralized system. The
delivery of mail was heavily subsidized, where it made it easy—the
vast—basically the postal system was the delivery of newspapers. But it
allowed, because it was decentralized, African Americans, people of color,
Native Americans, Latinos—first Latino Spanish-language newspaper, 1808—to
distribute newspapers. And that’s why we argue, to this very day, that
decentralization is really what’s been critical, that would allow us to be able
to tell our stories, whether it—from radio, television, and now the internet.
So I think that is the primary lesson, that these guys were able to even exist
at the time, because of postal policy.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And that was a result—because this—I
mentioned earlier the seminal debates. The first seminal debate in American
history over the media was the debate over the creation of the Post Office in
1792 in Congress, where different—different leaders, among the founding—the
founders of the country, had different viewpoints, because the Post
Office—Jefferson, Washington were in favor of the government delivering
newspapers to the people for free. Madison and others were saying, "No,
let’s do it at market rate, whatever it costs to deliver them."
Because—understand the importance of newspapers in America. Printers and editors
were critical to the American Revolution. Without the editors and printers who
got involved in spreading the word of opposition to England, it’s conceivable
that the Revolution would not have developed as quickly as it did. So the
printers then played a critical role—several of them—in the founding of the
country, and then they pressed for a postal system that would deliver papers,
because, remember, the United States was a country that had a territory that
was settled. People lived far apart in their farms all around the country. News
and information for a new country was critical to keeping the country together.
So that’s why Washington and Jefferson favored free delivery of newspapers. And
the postal system became the first internet, really. Wherever there was a
settlement, there was a post office. And the government built a road, a postal
road, to get to that post office and to deliver the mail. But 90 percent of the
mail was not letters. It was newspapers.
AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t the Post Office at first refuse
to mail abolitionist newspapers?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, yeah, that—but that came later, as
the battle over slavery occurred. But when the founders created the postal
system, a requirement was that it had to deliver all mail, and also that,
eventually, the compromise that they reached was the creation of a second-class
postal system, where basically papers were delivered at subsidized cost. So
that you had a situation where the United States quickly developed the
most—most newspapers per capita of any country in the world.
And, you know, I have,
like, one example, the town of Jacksonville, Illinois, right? In 1830,
Jacksonville, Illinois, which was the largest town in Illinois at that time,
had 446 residents. But those 446 residents, virtually every one of them was
receiving at least one periodical in the mail. Eighty-nine of them were
receiving two. And that didn’t—and those were only papers from out of town;
that didn’t include the papers that were being published within the town. So
that, basically, Americans read newspapers constantly, because the government
was subsidizing the delivery of the newspapers, and they were doing it because
our founders said that the widest possible dissemination of news and
information is vital to the preservation of the republic. So, there was a
government policy that said the people need to have news, and it should be
local news, and it should be subsidized news—very different from the market
advocates of today who say, "Keep the government out. Let us handle the internet,
and we’ll assure that the public gets the news and information it needs."
JOSEPH TORRES: [inaudible] statistic today. By the end
of the 1700s, within a 10-year period, the number of newspapers climbed from
around 90 to 200, around 200, 230. By 1830, it was 1,400 newspapers. That shows
you what postal policy did to really grow newspapers as a country, to allow for
the creation of newspapers in cities throughout the country and local towns.
So—
JUAN GONZALEZ: And that’s why you had—for instance,
before the Civil War, there were close to 100 Hispanic newspapers in the United
States—before the Civil War. The city of New Orleans alone had 25
Spanish-language newspapers, including a daily. That was a result of the
government-subsidized postal policies that made it very easy, if you could
print a paper, to get it delivered. And so that there was a fostering of local
press and local information. But that, of course, changed dramatically in the
late 19th century with the development of the telegraph.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to get to that after this
break. And I want to talk about Ida B. Wells and Rubén Salazar and where we are
today, with the internet and the battle over who controls the internet. Our
guests are Juan Gonzalez, usually here interviewing others on Democracy
Now!, but today, with Joe Torres, talking about their new epic work, News
for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. This
is Democracy Now! If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you
can go to our website at democracynow.org. We’ll be back with Juan and Joe in a
minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: News for All the People: The Epic
Story of Race and the American Media is our subject today. Bill Moyers
says, "We have needed this book for a long time." Our guests are the
authors: Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez, columnist with
the New York Daily News, award-winning journalist for decades, and
Joe Torres. He works with freepress.net, senior adviser for government and external
affairs, and before that, with the National Association of Hispanic
Journalists. Juan Gonzalez was president of the NAHJ.
Ida B. Wells, very
quickly, if you could tell us. Then I want to take this to Rubén Salazar and to
today, the internet.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Ida Wells was one of the early
muckrakers, that is not known as a muckraker in the official histories. But in
the late 19th century, she was the editor of a paper in Memphis, and three of
her friends were lynched by a mob. And she began a crusade against that lynching.
And her newspaper was burned down while she was out of town. And she then went
across the country, exposing the epidemic of lynching in America of African
Americans, and became a really crusading, the first crusading journalist on
this issue. And she’s known, again, in the histories of the black press, as one
of the giants of the press, but is, again, rarely mentioned or talked about in
official histories of the press in America. But she was a key figure, and not
only was involved with theNAACP later on, met with presidents over issues
of racial discrimination, was a major figure in the late 19th century and early
20th century. But again, she started as a crusading editor of a small newspaper
in Memphis.
AMY GOODMAN: Crusading editor, journalist, also could
be called advocacy journalist, which is a way of putting down journalists
today, Juan.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Right, although you note that the
muckrakers of the early 20th century—Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell and Lincoln
Steffens—are today seen as heroes. But these are the—largely, the white
muckrakers. The people of color who were doing the same thing, even earlier on,
are rarely mentioned. Jovita Idar is another one in Laredo, Texas, constantly
opposing racial discrimination and using her newspapers, and even standing off
against the Texas Rangers, who came to close down her paper in 1914. But people
like Jovita Idar, Ida B. Wells, you rarely hear about them.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about Rubén Salazar for a
minute, one of the best-known Latino journalists of the 20th century. On August
29th, 1970, he was killed after being struck in the head by a tear gas
projectile fired by a sheriff’s deputy into a bar during a massive antiwar
protest that he was covering is East Los Angeles. He was 42 years old. This is
Rubén Salazar in his own words.
RUBÉN SALAZAR: I’m only advocating the Mexican-American
community, just like the general media is advocating, really, our economy, our
country, our way of life. So I’m just advocating a community within a
community, which, by the way, the general community has totally ignored. And
so, someone must advocate that, because it’s easy for the establishment to say,
"Aren’t we all the same? Aren’t we all Americans?" Well, obviously
we’re not. Otherwise we wouldn’t be in the revolutionary process that we are in
now.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Rubén Salazar from the
documentary short story Since Salazar by the filmmakers
Leilani Montes and Victoria Fong.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, well, Salazar clearly was the
pivotal figure in the mid-20th century. He not only was a reporter for
the L.A. Times, a foreign correspondent for the L.A. Times,
but then he moved over to Spanish-language television, was a news director at a
Spanish-language station in L.A. And he was also an organizer. He organized
conferences of Latino leaders around the country, tried to appeal to the
editors and publishers of the various publications to open up their newsrooms,
change the nature of the coverage. So his death in 1970 was a real blow to the
media reform movement.
AMY GOODMAN: Killed by police?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes, killed by a sheriff’s tear gas
projectile—was a major blow to the media reform movement of the early 1970s, a
movement, by the way, that really was the democratic revolution. We point out
in the book that between 1970 and 1973 there were more than 340 license
challenges to the licenses of television and radio stations across the country.
As thousands of African-American and Latino community leaders—forgotten—people
like William Wright in Washington, D.C., Emma Bowen in New York, Lonnie King in
Atlanta—all marched into the television stations and the radio stations and
said, "We are fed up with your failure to cover our communities. We want
you to hire more African Americans and Latinos. We want you to have shows that
speak to our communities." And they launched a massive movement all across
the country challenging licenses. And as a result of that movement is when you
had the newsrooms opened up to people like Ben Bradley—I’m sorry, to Ed
Bradley—
AMY GOODMAN: 60 Minutes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: —and to Geraldo Rivera—
AMY GOODMAN: Fox.
JUAN GONZALEZ: —and to all of these first
generations—Gil Noble, Gloria Rojas. The first generation of African-American
and Latino journalists came into the newsrooms as a result of this massive
community movement of media reform in the 1970s.
JOSEPH TORRES: And on policy, it was because of the
famous WLBT case that allowed citizens to have legal standing to
challenge a license. The reason there is a media reform movement, even to this
day, is because of that court case happening. Citizens leveraged to actually
challenge a license. So again, policy allowing people to try to decentralize
media.
AMY GOODMAN: And LBT was, WLBT is?
JOSEPH TORRES: In Jackson, Mississippi, in which a
white supremacist ran the station, and he only had white supremacist views on
integration, and didn’t allow people like Medgar Evers to have any voice.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk for a minute about the
campaign against the popular radio showAmos 'n' Andy that aired
during the Depression. The show featured two white actors portraying two
uneducated black men. I want to ask about the Pittsburgh Courier’s
campaign against the program. Just take a listen.
AMOS: Tell me this. Why can’t they have a Democrat and a Republican
president at the same time? Let Hoover be president one week and Al Smith be
president the next week. Ain’t no use to have a lot of hard feelings.
ANDY: Amos, the president of the country don’t have nothing to
do now. The trouble with that is, the Republican would get everything messed up
for the Democrat, and vice versa.
AMOS: And what?
ANDY: Vice versa.
AMOS: He ain’t runnin, is he?
ANDY: Who ain’t runnin’?
AMOS: Bryce Vizzers.
ANDY: I didn’t say "Bryce Vizzers." I said "vice
versa."
AMOS: Is he a Democrat or a Republican?
ANDY: Uh-oh.
AMOS: Well, I don’t know Bryce Vizzers.
ANDY: You don’t know nothin’. Vice versa ain’t
no man.
AMOS: Well, what is he doing in the White House then?
ANDY: He ain’t in the White House. Boy, you is dumb.
AMOS: I ain’t no dumber than you is.
ANDY: You is just as dumb as I is, though.
AMOS: Now, tell me this. How many votes do it take to elect a
president?
ANDY: Well, one of them has got to have the majority.
AMOS: Mm-hmm.
ANDY: And the other has got to have the plurality.
AMOS: Both of them is bad, ain’t they? My grandpa had the
pleurisy, but I ain’t never heard nobody having that other thing.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s white actors, blackface
minstrels, Amos and Andy. Talk about the campaign to get them off the air, Juan
Gonzalez.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, people must understand that in the
1930s Amos 'n' Andy was the most popular show in America on
radio. It was a huge hit and—among white—in the white population.
AMY GOODMAN: How many people listening each night?
JUAN GONZALEZ: As many as 40 million people a night—
JOSEPH TORRES: Half the radio audience.
JUAN GONZALEZ: —were listening on the radio to Amos
'n' Andy.
AMY GOODMAN: 7:15 every night?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. So what happens is that the Pittsburgh
Courier, Robert L. Vann, one of the giants of African-American journalism
in the 20th century, in 1931 launches a campaign againstAmos 'n' Andy,
against the racial stereotypes, the demeaning images, that Amos 'n'
Andy was producing every night. More than 700,000 African Americans
sent letters in to the FC—to the Federal Radio Commission, and that the Pittsburgh
Courier collected in a huge campaign the first, really, media reform
campaign on a national level. And you think, that’s about 10 percent of the
entire black population of the country, protested the Amos 'n' Andy show.
The Federal Radio Commission completely ignored the protest.
AMY GOODMAN: This is under Herbert Hoover?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, yes. This was in the period
after—yes, Herbert Hoover, 1931. But the key issue was that this was a national
effort. And when you read—and we quote some of the letters that came in—the
devastating impact that this show was having on how African Americans were
viewed, it was incredible.
AMY GOODMAN: Internet—please talk about the battle
over the privacy issues, over the privatization, rather, of the internet, Joe
Torres.
JOSEPH TORRES: Well, quite simply, the internet is an
open platform. Anyone—ISPs can—have, up to now, have not been able to interfere
with your web traffic. You can access any site you want without being slowed
down. What they want to do is create—they want to be able to have a
pay-for-play system, where if you have a website at Democracy Now!, Democracy
Now! will have to pay more to make sure the public can see your site
at the fastest speeds, otherwise you’re going to be slowed down. For people of
color, it is critical, because of the low barrier of entries, the internet,
that we keep the internet open, a free platform, because we don’t have the
economic wealth to be able to pay ISPs to make sure our sites are loaded
faster.
AMY GOODMAN: The role of civil right groups in this?
JOSEPH TORRES: Well, unfortunately, this is where—it’s
a big departure from history, where they always fought for decentralization.
The civil rights groups have sided with the telecom companies, for various
reasons. Some are not—in my opinion, some don’t understand the issue that well.
And when the telecom companies say this is going to hurt people of color, they
believe them. Some are just ideologically aligned. They think what AT&T
thinks is best for our communities, they think is best, too. And, you know,
they—I know a lot of them don’t like when we say this, but, I mean, money is a
factor. Comcast has given $1.8 billion in cash, in-kind contributions over the
past decade, to civic organizations, including civil rights groups. AT&T in
2010 gave $150 million to civic organizations and civil rights groups. And the
head of the political arm in Washington for AT&T is the chair of the
AT&T Foundation that doles out this money. So, unfortunately—
AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.
JOSEPH TORRES: So, unfortunately—there are a lot of
groups of color and media justice groups that support an open internet. It’s an
ongoing debate.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is part one of our conversation.
Congratulations on this remarkable work, News for All the People: The
Epic Story of Race and the American Media , by Juan Gonzalez and Joe
Torres. They’re traveling across the country. They will be in New York next
Thursday night. We’ll be having a major event with them at Cooper Union, then
to Friday it will be in Oakland. You can go to our website for all the dates—Santa Cruz, Fresno,
Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Northridge, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, San
Antonio, Houston, Denver and Washington, D.C. Go to democracynow.org for all of
those details that document the book tour of Juan Gonzalez and Joe Torres.
This
Year’s Best-Kept Secret: The Next Generation of Community Radio
By Amy
Goodman with Denis Moynihan
A
microphone and a radio transmitter in the hands of a community organizer
imparts power, which some liken to the life-changing impact when humans first
tamed fire. That’s why the prospect of 1,000 new community radio
stations in the United States, for which the Federal Communications
Commission will accept applications this October, is so vital and urgent.
Workers
toiling in the hot fields of south-central Florida, near the isolated town of
Immokalee, were enduring conditions that U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy called “slavery,
plain and simple.” Some worked from dawn to dusk, under the watch of armed
guards, earning only $20 a week. Twenty years ago, they began organizing,
forming the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Ten years later, working with the
Philadelphia-based nonprofit Prometheus Radio Project, the
workers started their own radio station, Radio Consciencia, to serve the
farmworker community and inform, mobilize and help the struggling workers forge
better lives.
As the
largest media corporations on the planet have been consolidating during the
past two decades, putting the power of the media in fewer hands, there has been
a largely unreported flowering of small, local media outlets. An essential
component of this sector is community radio, stations that have emerged from
the Low-Power FM (LPFM) radio movement. This October, community groups in the
United States will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to apply to
the FCC for an LPFM radio-station license. But the
mainstream media are hardly reporting on this critical development.
“This is
a historic opportunity for communities all over the country to have a voice
over their airwaves,” Jeff Rousset, national organizer of the Prometheus
Radio Project, told me
on the Democracy Now! news hour. “The airwaves are
supposed to belong to the public. This is a chance for groups to actually own
and control their own media outlets.” The Prometheus Radio Project formed in
1998. It was named after the Greek mythological hero who first gave fire to
humans to make their lives more bearable.
Back in
the 1980s and ‘90s, “pirate” radio stations, unlicensed by the FCC, were
launched in communities across the U.S. by people frustrated with the failures
of the commercial and public media system, which was increasingly closed to the
communities and seemingly beholden to corporate underwriters and interest
groups. Harassed for their broadcasting efforts by federal agents, the pirates
formed Prometheus, intent on changing the federal laws and opening the radio
dial to a new
generation of noncommercial, community-based stations. After
15 years of organizing, they won. Rousset said, “We’re going to turn static
into sound and use that to amplify people’s voices all over the country.”
Across
the U.S. from Immokalee, farmworkers in rural Woodburn, Ore., were fighting
against oppressive conditions similar to the tomato and watermelon pickers in
Florida. The largest Latino organization in Oregon, PCUN, Pineros y
Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (in English, the Northwest Treeplanters and
Farmworkers United), founded an LPFM radio station, Radio Movimiento
(Movement Radio). PCUN’s president, Ramon Ramirez, explained: “We’ve been able
to use Radio Movimiento: La Voz del Pueblo ... not only to organize
farmworkers, but also to provide information. ... For example, we’re
broadcasting in four indigenous languages from Mexico and Central America, and
we’re giving those folks a voice in the community that they never had.”
When I
was covering the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, in early 1994, I
attended the first press conference held by the Zapatista military commanders,
including Subcomandante Marcos and Comandante Ramona. They called it
specifically for Mexican radio journalists. Radio, Marcos said, was the most
accessible form of mass communication. Even the poorest village had at least
one radio around which people could gather, he said.
Social-media
platforms like Twitter and Facebook have been rightly credited with supporting
social movements like the Arab Spring in recent years. But the fact remains
that most people in the U.S. receive their news from traditional sources,
especially radio and television, more so in groups separated by the “digital
divide”—the poor, immigrants and other marginalized communities.
LPFM applications
must be filed in October, and significant advanced planning is required by any
applicant group that hopes to succeed. The Oregon workers knew nothing about
radio. Prometheus recruited 300 media activists from around the world to help
get them on the air with a radio “barn raising” where volunteers literally
built the station from the ground up.
The
airwaves are a public treasure, and we have to take them back. The Prometheus
Radio Project is waiting to hear from you.
Amy
Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news
hour airing on more than 1,000 stations in North America. She is the co-author
of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
© 2013
Amy Goodman
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In
Historic Victory for Community Radio, FCC Puts 1,000 Low-Power FM
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STORY
·
"News
for All the People": Juan González & Joseph Torres on the Epic Story
of Race & the U.S. MediaOct 13, 2011 |
STORY
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2010
Robert McChesney and John Nichols on
"The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will
Begin the World Again"
University
of Illinois Professor Robert McChesney and The Nation correspondent
John Nichols, two leading advocates of the media reform movement, join us to
talk about their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism:
The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. McChesney and Nichols
argue that journalism should be seen as a public good and that the government
should help save American journalism by granting more subsidies to newspapers
and media outlets. [includes rush transcript]
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, 2009 was one of the
bleakest years in memory for the news industry. One count found that 142 daily
and weekly newspapers closed down, nearly triple the number in 2008.
Colorado’s oldest newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, shut its doors last February. The nation’s oldest gay and lesbian newspaper, the Washington Blade, abruptly closed in November. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer scaled down to a web-only publication. The Christian Science Monitor became a weekly publication.
Colorado’s oldest newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, shut its doors last February. The nation’s oldest gay and lesbian newspaper, the Washington Blade, abruptly closed in November. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer scaled down to a web-only publication. The Christian Science Monitor became a weekly publication.
Many
other news organizations slashed the size of their newsrooms. An estimated
90,000 workers lost their jobs last year in the newspaper, magazine and book
publishing industry.
Our next
guests argue that journalism should be seen as a public good, that the
government should help save American journalism by granting more subsidies to
newspapers and media outlets. Robert McChesney and John Nichols make their case
in a book titled The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media
Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. They argue that government
subsides for journalism have a long history in the United States dating back to
the founding of the country, when newspaper and journal publishers received
large printing and postal subsidies.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert McChesney and John
Nichols write, quote, "Like all public goods, we need the resources to get
it produced. This is the role of the state and public policy. It will require a
subsidy and should be regarded as similar to the education system or the
military in that regard."
Well, Bob
McChesney and John Nichols join us here in New York. Robert McChesney is a
professor at the University of Illinois. John Nichols is the Washington
correspondent for The Nation magazine. Together they helped
found the media organization Free Press. Their new book is called The
Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the
World Again.
Welcome,
both, to Democracy Now!
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Bob McChesney, “the media
revolution that will begin the world again”?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, that’s a quote from
Tom Paine, because we think we’re in a moment of crisis right now for
journalism, not just the sort of the long-term crisis we often talk about and
you chronicle on this program, but really a freefall collapse in which, in the
next few years, the decisions we make will determine whether we even have
journalism as it’s been known traditionally.
The
business model that has supported journalism for the last 125 years in this
country is disintegrating. There will be some advertising, but much less. There
will be some circulation revenues, but much less. And if we’re going to have
journalism in this country, it’s going to require that there be public
subsidies to create an independent, uncensored, nonprofit, non-commercial news
media sector.
And we
argue in the book, as you said, that we actually have a very rich tradition of
this. The first hundred years of American history, the founders did not assume
the market would give us journalism. There was no such assumption at all. They
understood it was the first duty of a democratic state to see that a vibrant,
independent, uncensored Fourth Estate exist.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of the — it’s
not just in the early years of the republic, obviously, but the government has
helped to subsidize the research into all the different technologies, whether
it was the telegraph, whether it was radio, whether it was the internet, all of
the work that was done by the National Science Foundation to fund the
development of the internet. So there is a long tradition of this. But then,
why is there so much resistance now to say, well, if journalism is in trouble,
what should be the government’s role?
JOHN NICHOLS: Well, I think the most
important thing that we bring out in the book, perhaps the vital message, is
that there is a hidden history of the First Amendment, a history that was
really stolen from us as we entered into a commercial age in the last century,
century and a half.
At the
founding of the republic, there was a deep understanding on the part of the
founders that if you promise people freedom of the press, that was a wonderful
notion, a great concept, but it was an empty promise, meaningless, if there
wasn’t a press. You know, you say, “Well, we’re not going to censor you.” Well,
if there’s nothing to censor, it doesn’t matter. And so, the founders
understood, and well into the nineteenth century there was an understanding,
that you never censored, you set up a landscape where independent journalism
could be practiced and could come in all sorts of forms.
Since
then, some of that understanding has remained, with creation of some of the
technologies you discussed. But the theft of that definition of freedom of the
press, that it really is uncensored, but also easily developed, and that when
it’s needed it comes into play, that’s been stolen. And in the book, we talk a
lot about who really drove the development of an understanding of a press
subsidy system. It wasn’t Jefferson and Madison. They favored it. They thought
it was a kind of a necessary evil, you’ve got to have it. The people who drove
it were the abolitionists, the people on the outside, saying the original sin
of the American experiment must be addressed, and they said, you know, we’ve
got to have the resources to create independent, dissenting, small-town
weeklies, and they did.
AMY GOODMAN: Go into that further. Who
were these abolitionists?
JOHN NICHOLS: People you know. People who
died, literally, struggling to create independent weeklies. African — freed
slaves and runaway slaves, as well.
ROBERT McCHESNEY: And Garrison.
JOHN NICHOLS: Garrison himself. People
who were killed at their presses.
The fact
of the matter is, at the founding of the country, we had a baseline press
subsidy system, but it wasn’t sufficient to really sustain it. And so, for
decade after decade, there were congressional debates over how to extend it and
whether to really take off the postal subsidies for the smallest papers, which
circulated, you know, at a local level. It was the abolitionists who fought for
it, people like Garrison and others. But the fascinating thing is, when you
start to rip open this history, go to the truth, you find that Uncle
Tom’s Cabin has scenes where post offices are being attacked by
Southern slavers who don’t want the abolitionist press to be delivered. I mean,
this is such rich, good history.
And what
we understand, what we come to realize, is that we can create a system in this
country today that allows the new abolitionist movements, the new dissenting
movements, to have a voice. It won’t be a dominant voice. It won’t be as much
as we’d like. But they can be in play. But if we don’t act now, we, the people,
as citizens, we’re going to end up in a situation where the vast majority of
our news and information is packaged by power, by elites, but the same people
who didn’t want the abolitionists to have a voice 200 years ago.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Bob McChesney, I’d like to
ask you, we got reports today, in today’s paper, CBS News is laying
off another 100 people. ABC News is expecting a new round of layoffs.
There are those who argue, well, the internet is providing now the kind of
platform in news and information that the old media — radio, TV and newspapers
— are no longer able to do so and that the internet will eventually supplant
this, this is only a transition period. You argue in your book somewhat
differently about the nature of newsrooms and their value vis-à-vis what’s
appearing on the internet.
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Yeah, it’s a really
important point, Juan, because, you know, everything is going digital. This
program is largely received, or will be, digitally at some point in the very
near future, not just on television and radio systems. And it’s not a technological
argument we’re making about one technology supplanting another. We understand
the digital times we’re in. The argument that’s crucial is whether the internet
is going to provide the basis for substantive journalism to replace what’s
disintegrating before us. And we go through this very carefully in the
book.
And I
think it’s obvious that if we want to look at actual resources, so people who
get paid money to cover beats, who are accountable for them, who are competing
with other journalists, who have proofreaders and copy editors and fact
checkers and institutions to support them in their work, they’re just not
happening online. The resources there barely exist. There are only a handful of
journalists who can make a living doing journalism online. And what you have
there, too, is if you’re seeking out advertising support, it puts journalism in
a very compromised position, because there’s such a competition for the scarce
ad dollars. It really undermines the integrity of news that is essential for a
credible free news system.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, and even within the
old media, newspapers are still the, as I say, the fountainhead of news. I
remember once in 1985, I was at Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer.
We were on strike, and we were on strike for five weeks. And all my friends in
TV came to me and said, “When are you guys going to go back to work? Because
without you, we don’t know what to report.” This is the TV news.
JOHN NICHOLS: Hey, Juan, let me tell you
how real that still is, and this is the scary part. There’s a new Pew Center
study out. They actually studied Baltimore. They looked at where all the
original newspapers came from. They looked at all the independent media, all
the online, everything. They found that 96 percent, almost 96 percent — there’s
a little debate about the precise figure, but well over 90 — came from old
media, largely from the daily newspaper, the Baltimore Sun. But
here’s the scary part: the footnote. The Baltimore Sun is
producing 73 percent fewer original news stories today than twenty years ago.
So new media is commenting on old media, but it’s not filling the void of news.
Old media is giving us a lot less.
And so,
you say, well, OK, come on, Pew Center folks, tell us, where is the news coming
from? Who is generating it, if it’s not — well, it’s in there. Eighty-six
percent of the stories came in the form of public relations, either from
government or from corporations; only 14 percent produced by a reporter who
went out and tried to speak truth to power. This is a scary zone we’re
entering.
AMY GOODMAN: So you talk about these
press releases and corporations. Let’s, instead of talking about old and new
media, talk about corporate media and public media. Bob McChesney, you say the
crisis didn’t come with, oh, the internet is just putting newspapers out of
business. Explain that divide and what you think has brought journalism to
where it is today.
ROBERT McCHESNEY: There’s been a long-term
tension between private ownership of media and the public good that is journalism,
what we need to govern our own lives. And it really, a hundred years ago, first
became a major crisis. And that led — as newspapers became monopolized in city
after city, you only had one or two newspapers in most cities in the country by
the second or third decade of the century, except in the largest cities. And
the solution then was the idea of professional journalism, that was sort of a
reckless barrier between the newsroom and the owners and the advertisers. So
you could — it wouldn’t matter if you only had one newspaper in a town, because
professional journalists wouldn’t be influenced by their owners or advertisers.
They’d be trained at J-schools, journalism schools, to do the right
thing.
And that
system worked, for better or for worse, into the middle or second — the final
third of this last century. But what happened then is you saw the increasing
conglomerization, concentration, takeover of newsrooms, both broadcast and
print, by large chains. And they basically found a monopolistic environment, so
they could gut newsrooms and get away with it, because no one had any
alternative. So we saw the diminution of resources to news from the closing of
Washington bureaus, of foreign bureaus, of statehouse bureaus, began in earnest
in the 1980s, and it accelerated greatly in the 1990s, long before Google
existed, long before the internet. By the time the internet came along, what it
did is that it just sort pushed over the tottering giant. It accelerated the
process. It made it permanent, but it didn’t create it, nor will it solve it on
its own.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now you have some
solutions, some unusual solutions, that you posited in your book in terms of
how the country can invest in the infrastructure of news dissemination for the
public. Could you talk about some of those solutions?
JOHN NICHOLS: We try. And one thing that
we’re trying to do with this book, though, is open a dialogue, not close it. We
think we have ideas. We want to throw them in the mix. But we throw them into
the mix primarily to get people thinking about it and to say to citizens, you
can be part of this discourse about the media that you want in the twenty-first
century. You can have more Democracy Now!s. You can have more openmediaboston.org, all these institutions.
But you have to figure out how to support them. There’s great people out there
trying to do it, but they’re starving. How do we feed them?
And one
of the things we suggest is that we’re losing a generation of young journalists
right now, kids who want to go into this craft, who love it, for the same
reasons that you and you went in some — a few years ago. And we have in America
now an Americorps, where we say to a kid who wants to teach, you can go into a
community, an underserved, rural or urban community, and start teaching there,
and the government will provide a little bit of a stipend, some support. Why
not a News Americorps, where we send young people into communities to work at
community radio stations, to work in — to develop news sites in underserved
places, maybe to supercharge a high school radio station, something like that?
And why not, at the same time, supercharge funding to begin to get to something
akin to European levels for public media, public broadcasting, and especially
community stations around this country? There are simple things we could start
doing right now, and these are not recreating the wheel. These are really
policy choices.
AMY GOODMAN: What are those European
models? How much do they put into public media, Bob McChesney?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, I think the research
we did in the book was really mind-boggling and eye-opening. Just start with
the American tradition first, our own tradition in the first half of the
nineteenth century. We wanted to compute, you know, this federal subsidy from
the post office, which primarily was the distribution arm of newspapers —
that’s 95 percent of its traffic — and the printing subsidies in the first half
of the nineteenth century. How significant were they? And so, we actually went
back and determined what percentage of GDP they were in the first
half of the nineteenth century. If we had the same percentage of gross domestic
product today, by the federal government as a subsidy to journalism, how much would
the federal government pay? And it was $30 billion. I mean, it was such an
enormous investment by the federal government to create a free press. It wasn’t
just a piddly side thing; it was, after military, the largest expense of the
federal government for the first seventy-five years of our history, into the
Civil War period.
And then
we went to look at other — you know, generally, when people ask about
government subsidies, they think of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot.
They think of all these terrible dictatorships. We said, well, that’s not
really the relevant comparison for the United States. We should look at other
democracies. What are they doing in Europe and in Asia, and even in third world
countries that are democracies? And what we discovered is, all of them, or
almost all them, have significantly large public media, community media and
journalism subsidies. They vary from country to country, but they’re all
enormous compared to the United States. And if you look at northern Europe, for
example, this average country up there in Scandinavia or Holland or Germany, in
US terms, if you put it to per capita basis and put it in the United States,
we’d have to spend between $20 and $35 billion a year to subsidize public media
and journalism to be equal to those countries.
JOHN NICHOLS: And if I could just add,
that figure sounds like a lot of money, especially when everybody in Washington
is telling us that we’re broke. That’s about twelve weeks of the war in Iraq.
That’s about four or five percent of the first bank bailout. And I would just
suggest to you that when you go out and talk to Americans and tell them, for
this investment, you can avoid the next war in Iraq, you can avoid the next big
bank bailout, because we will really have information to serve civic and
democratic purposes, rather than commercial entertainment, you’d be blown away
by the extent that they get it. There’s a great disregard for the American
people, especially in this issue. When we’ve been traveling around the country,
we’ve been blown away by the extent to which citizens are scared and concerned.
They’re afraid that we’re moving toward something very akin to a propaganda
state, and they want to make sure that they have the information to govern. And
that investment, while it’s a big figure, it’s a small figure when you look at
what’s at stake.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to John
Nichols and Bob McChesney. We’re going to break and then come back. They have
co-written The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution
that Will Begin the World Again. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are John Nichols
and Bob McChesney. They both founded Free Press, and they’ve come out with a
new book. It’s called The Death and Life of American Journalism: The
Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. I’m Amy Goodman, with
Juan Gonzalez.
So, you
talk about subsidies for journalism today. People might be saying, wait, what
about the separation of press from the state? Won’t that compromise it? Bob
McChesney.
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, you know, it’s really
the central issue we all care about. I mean, I think there are two great
components of free press in the United States in our tradition. The first great
component is the one we all know about, that government shouldn’t censor
content, it shouldn’t regulate journalists, it shouldn’t prohibit anyone from
entering doing media, like any of us. And that should never be
compromised.
But the
second great tradition of the American free press tradition is that it’s the first
duty of the state to make sure free press exists. And that part has been lost
in the shuffle. One of the striking things we discovered, Amy and Juan, when we
did our research is we reread all the First Amendment cases of the US Supreme
Court in the last hundred years, all the freedom of the press cases. And what
was striking in Hugo Black, in Potter Stewart, in all the great cases, was the
assumption that it was the first duty of a democratic government to make sure a
credible Fourth Estate exists. Otherwise the entire governance of the country
will collapse. You cannot have a democracy and self-government and the rule of
law.
And when
I read those words initially in graduate school thirty years ago, I didn’t pay
any attention, because we had a press system. For better or for worse, it
existed. You know, you might dispute the quality of it, but it certainly
existed in sufficient quantity. And now, though, when you read those words,
they jump off the page at you, because we’re seeing a disintegration. It really
says that if we understand the First Amendment properly, it’s not that it
condones our creating new media, it demands it.
JUAN GONZALEZ: In terms of some of the
proposals you have in the book, you have one, for instance, about a tax — a
federal tax credit that would help support media. Could you talk about that?
But also in the context of the fact that — I wouldn’t say now that journalists
have a high rating among the American public, that, generally speaking, there
is a sense, in great proportions of the American population, that the media are
part of the problem. Now, admittedly, much of that is directed at the
commercial media, but even the fact that the nonprofit media doesn’t even
register that much in terms of the public’s concern, the issue then becomes,
how do you get the public to marshal behind government support of the media
when there’s such a public discontent with the media?
JOHN NICHOLS: Look, the first thing you
say is, we’re not here to save the media that gave you George Bush in a stolen
election of 2000 or gave you the war in Iraq. I mean, that was a lousy media
system, and if that system is going down, let’s not send the Coast Guard out.
But, if we’re going send the Coast Guard out to save anything, let’s save some
journalists. Let’s save the concept of gathering information and speaking truth
to power.
And this
— you know, you’re right. The surveys will show, do you like mainstream media?
No, they don’t. But if you ask people, do you want information, and do you want
it in an easily accessible way, where I can get it when I need it and not have
to spend six or seven hours trolling the internet trying to find the truth?
Yeah, they say yes.
You know,
we frame our entire dialogue, and our entire message here, not for, you know,
somebody who’s working in journalism, not for somebody who’s got an immense
amount of time to consume journalism. We say this is not a dialogue about
journalism, newspapers or media. This is a dialogue about democracy. And James
Madison, for all of his failings — again, part of this hidden history — James
Madison said that a supposedly democratic system without freedom of the press
and access to the information that it provides is a prologue to a tragedy or a
farce or both. What we’re suggesting is, this old media system, for however we
refer to it, produced tragedy and farce: a war, an unelected president. What we
want to talk about now is how we create a new media system that works and
sustains democracy.
And you
know what? At every event we’ve done across the country, and in dialogues all
over — and I think, the truth is, you two know this — you start talking about
it in that way, and you start saying these are public policy choices that
citizens can be involved in, people get very engaged, and they come up with
better ideas than Bob and I have written about already. And that’s where we
want this discourse to go. We don’t want to end it; we want to start it. It’s
going to take a long time, but if we don’t have this discourse, I can guarantee
you, in the next ten years, we will move to a state where we will look back
longingly to the days of the great media of the late 1990s or early 2000s.
That’s how dangerous the future looks.
AMY GOODMAN: What are the latest issues
that the Free Press has taken on? For example, the issue of net neutrality.
Where is it now? Are the corporations, the cable companies, the telecoms,
writing the legislation that would privatize the internet?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: They are. Right now, the
phone and cable companies are putting a full-court press on on Washington to
try to get net neutrality eliminated as policy, meaning that they would be able
to privatize the internet, in effect, and determine which web servers — which
websites, which services come through, and which don’t. And they would be like
the cable companies. You’d have to pay them off to get through, and they could
even prohibit you from going through if they wanted to. And it is a central
fight right now. The future of the internet hangs in the balance.
And Free
Press is leading the fight. They’re fighting at the FCC. They’re fighting
in the court system. They’re basically fighting behind closed doors. They’re
not doing it at Congress yet, but we have to be authority. And again, in this
struggle, compared to journalism, with what Free Press is doing, we’re fighting
the biggest lobbies in Washington, just about. And these are companies,
AT&T and Comcast, that are not free market companies. They’re created by
government monopoly licenses. They’re not very good at what they do. Consumers
hate them. But what they’re great at doing is buying off politicians. That’s
their specialty. That’s their added advantage over everyone else.
The
journalism fight is a little different, though, that Free Press is engaged in,
because there, the corporations are heading out the door. They’re saying, “See
you later. We had a nice run for a hundred years. We cashed in our chips. Now
we’re moving on to something else.” Here, there’s this massive void we’re
trying to fill, and I think it’s a different political fight for that reason.
And it gives us hope that we could have more success, since the sort of stuff
we’re talking about will increase journalism. And actually, if you look at
European countries, those countries that have instituted the most journalism
subsidies for independent, community and public media, for alternative
newspapers, the private media prosper, too, the private journalism, because
there’s a real community of journalism, and the sort of the tide raises all the
boats. So, there, I think the political fight is — we’re farther away from
people envisioning that we have the power in us to change it, but we don’t have
the same direct corporate opposition that we face in net neutrality, where
truly we’re fighting giants that are determined to destroy us.
JUAN GONZALEZ: One of the interesting
things, though, about this net neutrality fight, what’s different, is that
they’ve not only — the telecoms have not only bought off the politicians, they
are increasingly neutralizing and winning over major civil rights
organizations, so that in the past, where civil rights movement was part of the
movement to democratize the media, what’s happening now, unfortunately, is,
whether it’s the National Council of La Raza or several of these other civil
rights groups, they’re lining up now with the telecoms on this issue and making
it a lot more difficult to build a more solid mass movement around it.
JOHN NICHOLS: Well, Juan, these are the
struggles we always have. And again, these are — Joe Rogers has this phrase, an
offhand phrase, but one that describes it: you know, hungry people fighting
over food don’t demand what they need, right? And so, we have many groups that
have limited resources, especially in this bad economic time, and so the
telecoms and others are looking around for anybody that they can
influence.
But I
want to defend a lot of folks in the civil rights community. Congresswoman
Donna Edwards, a person who comes from civil rights and activism, has been just
incredibly outspoken on these issues and has fought hard. Members of the
Congressional Latino Caucus — or Hispanic Caucus and Black Caucus — we have
many allies. Not as many as we want. We’re fighting. But I honestly believe
that that’s not the core challenge. It’s a part of it. It’s one we have to be
concerned about. We’ve got to do a lot of movement building.
But the
core challenge is when policy is made behind closed doors, when we don’t have
the light of day on it. And that’s what the telecoms are trying to do. They’re
trying to come in at a moment when we have so many other issues we’re worrying
about — wars and a bad economy and all that — and move behind the scenes. Our
great struggle is to push this into the open. And we have, amazingly enough —
and I’ve been very critical of President Obama on a lot of issues, but just the
other day, he said, in a YouTube interview, that he’s passionately in favor of
net neutrality, that it is absolutely essential, didn’t back off a bit. And
that’s important, because everybody’s looking for the tiniest opening. The bad
guy is looking for the tiniest opening. The President sent a good signal there.
AMY GOODMAN: What about Comcast’s
takeover of NBC?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, it’d be horrible.
It’s exactly the wrong direction to go. You know, I think this gets back to the
journalism issue again, because, you know, it’s funny, people say, well, if you
subsidize independent, nonprofit, non-commercial media, you’re letting the
government get its hands in the way. Well, if you do nothing, what we’re
evolving to very rapidly in this country is sort of a nexus of corporate power
and government power, where corporations are driving it, much like the Gilded
Age, but, you know, on steroids. That should frighten anyone who’s genuinely
concerned about government power. And when you allow — the government allows
these companies like Comcast and NBC, both of which were built on
government monopoly licenses — these are not
free-market companies, they’re built on government monopoly licenses — to merge so that the same company that dominates internet service provision also is producing the content that goes over those wires, so it has a stake in basically setting up a private network.
free-market companies, they’re built on government monopoly licenses — to merge so that the same company that dominates internet service provision also is producing the content that goes over those wires, so it has a stake in basically setting up a private network.
JUAN GONZALEZ: So, like Cablevison
and Newsday here in New York, the same thing.
JOHN NICHOLS:
And in communities across this country.
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Everywhere, and wiping out
any alternative voices. It is exactly the darkest Orwellian future. It’s why
the journalism fight now is so important, because it has to be the
counterbalance to this combined corporate-government power.
AMY GOODMAN: We have
to leave it there. I want to thank you both for being with us. Robert McChesney
and John Nichols, their new book, The Death and Life of American
Journalism.
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a daily independent global news hour
with Amy Goodman & Juan González
This Year’s Best-Kept Secret: The Next Generation of
Community Radio
A microphone and a radio transmitter
in the hands of a community organizer imparts power, which some liken to the
life-changing impact when humans first tamed fire.
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
A microphone and a radio transmitter
in the hands of a community organizer imparts power, which some liken to the
life-changing impact when humans first tamed fire. That’s why the prospect of
1,000 new community radio stations in the United States, for which the Federal
Communications Commission will accept applications this October, is so vital
and urgent.
Workers toiling in the hot fields of
south-central Florida, near the isolated town of Immokalee, were enduring
conditions that U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy called “slavery, plain and simple.”
Some worked from dawn to dusk, under the watch of armed guards, earning only
$20 a week. Twenty years ago, they began organizing, forming the Coalition of
Immokalee Workers. Ten years later, working with the Philadelphia-based
nonprofit Prometheus Radio Project, the workers started their own radio station, Radio
Consciencia, to serve the farmworker community and inform, mobilize and help
the struggling workers forge better lives.
As the largest media corporations on
the planet have been consolidating during the past two decades, putting the
power of the media in fewer hands, there has been a largely unreported
flowering of small, local media outlets. An essential component of this sector
is community radio, stations that have emerged from the Low-Power FM (LPFM)
radio movement. This October, community groups in the United States will have a
once-in-a-generation opportunity to apply to the FCC for an LPFM radio-station
license. But the mainstream media are hardly reporting on this critical
development.
“This is a historic opportunity for
communities all over the country to have a voice over their airwaves,” Jeff
Rousset, national organizer of the Prometheus Radio Project, told me on the Democracy Now! news hour. “The airwaves are supposed to belong to the public. This is
a chance for groups to actually own and control their own media outlets.” The
Prometheus Radio Project formed in 1998. It was named after the Greek
mythological hero who first gave fire to humans to make their lives more
bearable.
Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, “pirate”
radio stations, unlicensed by the FCC, were launched in communities across the
U.S. by people frustrated with the failures of the commercial and public media
system, which was increasingly closed to the communities and seemingly beholden
to corporate underwriters and interest groups. Harassed for their broadcasting
efforts by federal agents, the pirates formed Prometheus, intent on changing
the federal laws and opening the radio dial to a new generation of noncommercial, community-based stations. After 15 years of organizing, they won. Rousset said,
“We’re going to turn static into sound and use that to amplify people’s voices
all over the country.”
Across the U.S. from Immokalee,
farmworkers in rural Woodburn, Ore., were fighting against oppressive
conditions similar to the tomato and watermelon pickers in Florida. The largest
Latino organization in Oregon, PCUN, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste
(in English, the Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United), founded an
LPFM radio station, Radio Movimiento (Movement Radio). PCUN’s president, Ramon
Ramirez, explained: “We’ve been able to use Radio Movimiento: La Voz del Pueblo
... not only to organize farmworkers, but also to provide information. ... For
example, we’re broadcasting in four indigenous languages from Mexico and
Central America, and we’re giving those folks a voice in the community that
they never had.”
When I was covering the Zapatista
uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, in early 1994, I attended the first press
conference held by the Zapatista military commanders, including Subcomandante
Marcos and Comandante Ramona. They called it specifically for Mexican radio
journalists. Radio, Marcos said, was the most accessible form of mass
communication. Even the poorest village had at least one radio around which
people could gather, he said.
Social-media platforms like Twitter
and Facebook have been rightly credited with supporting social movements like
the Arab Spring in recent years. But the fact remains that most people in the
U.S. receive their news from traditional sources, especially radio and
television, more so in groups separated by the “digital divide”—the poor,
immigrants and other marginalized communities.
LPFM applications must be filed in
October, and significant advanced planning is required by any applicant group
that hopes to succeed. The Oregon workers knew nothing about radio. Prometheus
recruited 300 media activists from around the world to help get them on the air
with a radio “barn raising” where volunteers literally built the station from
the ground up.
The airwaves are a public treasure,
and we have to take them back. The Prometheus Radio Project is waiting to hear
from you.
Amy Goodman is the host of
“Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than
1,000 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,”
a New York Times best-seller.
© 2013 Amy Goodman
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